Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The oscillation of a Laplacian eigenfunction gives a great deal of information about the manifold on which it is defined. This oscillation can be encoded in the nodal deficiency, an important geometric quantity that is notoriously hard to compute, or even estimate. Here we compare two recently obtained formulas for the nodal deficiency, one in terms of an energy function on the space of equipartitions of the manifold, and the other in terms of a two-sided Dirichlet-to-Neumann map defined on the nodal set. We relate these two approaches by giving an explicit formula for the Hessian of the equipartition energy in terms of the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map. This allows us to compute Hessian eigenfunctions, and hence directions of steepest descent, for the equipartition energy in terms of the corresponding Dirichlet-to-Neumann eigenfunctions. Our results do not assume bipartiteness, and hence are relevant to the study of spectral minimal partitions.  This is joint work with Greg Berkolaiko, Yaiza Canzani and Graham Cox.

In this presentation the analytical background of nonlinear observers based on minimal energy estimation is discussed. Originally, such strategies were proposed for the reconstruction of the state of finite dimensional dynamical systems by means of a measured output where both the dynamics and the output are subject to white noise. Our work aims at lifting this concept to a class of partial differential equations featuring deterministic perturbations using the example of a wave equation with a cubic defocusing term in three space dimensions. In particular, we discuss local regularity of the corresponding value function and consider operator Riccati equations to characterize its second spatial derivative.

I will discuss a nonlinear elliptic system of partial differential equations arising in Riemannian geometry and General Relativity. Specifically, I will present recent advances on the analysis of asymptotically Euclidean, initial data sets for Einstein’s field equations. In collaboration with Bruno Le Floch (Sorbonne University) I proved that solutions to the Einstein constraints can be glued together along possibly nested conical domains. The constructed solutions may have arbitrarily low decay at infinity, while enjoying (super-)harmonic estimates within possibly narrow cones at infinity. Importantly, our localized seed-to-solution method, as we call it, leads to a proof of a conjecture by Alessandro Carlotto and Richard Schoen on the localization problem at infinity, and generalize P. LeFloch and Nguyen’s theorem on the asymptotic localization problem. This lecture will be based on https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.17706

It has been known since the pioneering work of J.L. Lions in 1960s that 3D hyper-dissipative (HD) Navier-Stokes (NS) system exhibits global-in-time regularity as long as the hyper-diffusion exponent is greater or equal to 5/4.  One should note that at 5/4, the system is critical, i.e., the energy level and the scaling -invariant level coincide. What happens in the super-critical regime, the hyper-diffusion exponent being strictly between 1 and 5/4 remained a mystery. 

The goal of this talk is to demonstrate that as soon as the hyper-diffusion exponent is greater than 1, a class of monotone blow-up scenarios consistent with the analytic structure of the flow (prior to the possible singular time) can be ruled out (a sort of 'runaway train' scenario). The argument is in the spirit of the regularity theory of the 3D HD NS system in 'turbulent scenario' (in the super-critical regime) developed by Grujic and Xu, relying on 'dynamic interpolation' – however, it is much shorter, tailored to the class of blow-up profiles in view. This is a joint work with Aseel Farhat.